Dante's Inferno Review

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Dante’s Inferno
Platform: XBOX 360
Played For: 10 hours

This has been a good Holiday Season for Italian culture in video games. First we rode along with young Ezio as he explored the Purgatory of Renaissance Tuscany and Florence in Assassin’s Creed 2. Next Bayonetta waged a weird Art Deco war on Heaven. Having visited two of the three destinations in Dante Aligheri’s classic excursion through Christian mythology, it was only a matter of time before gamers returned to the setting of that venerable video game franchise Doom. Saving Dante’s first journey for last, Dante’s Inferno by Visceral Entertainment attempts to emulate a classic piece of literature in blockbuster video game form. An interesting project… but it seems a few liberties had to be taken in the translation.


In Dante’s Inferno you take the role of a strangely muscular Mr. Aligheri as he returns from the Crusades and discovers his love Beatrice has run into a spot of bad luck. You see, while Dante was busy becoming an action figure and rewriting history (Dante was never actually in the Crusades, although apparently his grandfather was) he indulged in a bit of stress-relief sex with some non-Beatrice woman. While breaking vows is never a good thing, and Dante could certainly expect to catch some Hell upon returning from the war (haha!) it turns out that Christian Mythology is kind of like a teen slasher horror flick… any conjugal act, innocent or not, must be mercilessly punished with death, dismemberment and untold agony.

In this case we discover that while Dante was off fighting, his ideal woman managed to both make a wager with the devil that he would be faithful to her (oops!) and then to get herself killed (cripes!) It isn’t clear what Beatrice had to gain should she have won the wager, but since this game’s version of Dante is a creepy self-destructive “I am the lord of pain” Goth type, her chances to collect were not so very good. Well, in a turn of good luck Dante also dies during the war. Sure, this wouldn’t be the best scenario for most people, but don’t forget that the Dante of this game is some sort of He-Man superhero. Through sheer force of sulky indignation (and steely thinews no doubt) Dante manages to slay the Grim Reaper, steal his scythe and return home in order to chase Beatrice down into Hell. It isn’t clear what happens to the rest of the world now that the Grim Reaper is dead… maybe a zombie apocalypse? We’ll have to wait for the sequel for that one.

It is somewhere at this point (i.e. the first five minutes of the game) that you get the distinct sense that we might be straying slightly from the source material. Visceral has certainly done a number on Dante himself and his family. Dante’s father (about whom history is silent as far as I know) is demonized as a greedy, covetous monster. As to Dante himself, for some reason the character felt it was important to carve and sew a silk scarf into his chest in the form of a seeping, bloody cross (this is not a good idea, kids). The silk depicts various episodes from his recent guilty past, so it serves as a really bad substitute for owning a PDA or other memory assistant. Dante’s creative personal surgery came before he knew that Beatrice wasn’t at home waiting for him… maybe he didn’t think this act all the way through, but personally I don’t think coming home from work one day with a gaping self-inflicted religious icon sewn into your torso would go very far in ameliorating the admission of an infidelity.

I felt a bit of regret that an intelligent, informative game about the Inferno couldn’t have been made… something akin to the literate homage that Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle crafted in the early 80’s. However, moving past this obvious criticism there are a few good things about the game Dante’s Inferno that make it worth checking out. The game is fun to play; it has a tongue-in-cheek amusement factor, and an interesting visual style.

The imagery of Dante’s Inferno was the biggest draw for me, as it is somewhat inspired by the art of personal favorite Wayne Barlowe. When I was a kid, Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials [Figure 1] thoroughly captured my imagination. In it Barlowe illustrated many of the aliens from his favorite works of science fiction. He followed this with a Guide to Fantasy, and Expedition [Figure 2], a book that creates an entire alien ecosystem in vivid detail. More recently, however, Barlowe has focused his attention on Dante’s work, creating perhaps the most original and interesting depiction of the Inferno since Gustav Dore. You can definitely detect Barlow’s influence in the game, although more would have been better. The more alien and visionary aspects of Barlowe’s work were not included, often leaving the game just a few steps above generic in its sights and sounds.

Perhaps the most representative symbol for the mix of styles and influences present in Dante’s Inferno would be the poet Virgil, who guided Dante on his journey in the Divine Comedy and lives on the edge of Hell with all the other great scientists, poets and interesting people. Here, rather than the quiet author of the Aneid, we get more of a FrankenVirgil… tall, angular, spectral, with cracked skin and wild eyes, a booming voice and hair standing on end. FrankenVirgil occasionally appears and intones lines from the original work, following Dante on his quest for some unknown reason. He is trying hard to be creepy and unintentionally comic… a patched-together confusion of styles coupled with bad hair and a faint attempt to include the source material… Dante’s Inferno in a nutshell.

The only major theme of the game not present in FrankenVirgil is the prevalence of breasts. Good grief this game has boobs aplenty! From the always shirtless Beatrice to the giant demon-bosoms of the Cleopatra boss monster, mammary glands have never been so often and so lovingly depicted in a non-Japanese game. You even get your share of man-boobs on the generously corpulent gluttony devils. This reviewer is not so priggish as to turn away from a scene of Beatrice running from a house with the camera firmly fixed on her chest (an image completely ruined a moment later as some villain chucks a broadsword through her… is that even possible anyway? A broadsword is a very heavy item, and I’m quite dubious about its potential as a missile weapon… someone call the Mythbusters!) However, tit quickly becomes a joke that Hell is the breast place to bust a move... you get the idea. I suppose you could read in all this the sick and twisted irony that the main character doesn’t have nipples anymore, as he carved them out of his body. No wonder Dante’s version of Hell is teeming with taunting nipples.

You may have noticed that in this review I haven’t said much about the actual game play in Dante’s Inferno. There is an obvious comparison to another game that I’ll resist spelling out, but regardless there really isn’t much else to say on the topic. The game is competent and fun, easy to learn and well-implemented. The player chooses to have Dante focus either on his scythe combat or his holy cross attack, corresponding to whether Dante decides to punish or absolve the various doomed souls he encounters. This is pretty funny… it isn’t every game that lets you play a superhero with amazing redemption powers. To save, say, Pontius Pilot, from his place in Hell, you have to play a little mini-game wherein you catch his sins and free up his soul… I guess it is never too late for confession.

I could have done without the excessive B button mashing required to interact with every object from demonic doors to fountains of health and magic. Also, the combat didn’t require too much variation of strategy… one or two powerful techniques pretty much work for every enemy you’ll encounter. But while the devil is in the details, Dante’s Inferno works best when you ignore him and just run with it. It is a quick, action-packed adventure with a few new things to show off, and is probably well worth a rental or purchasing at half price some six months, six days and six hours from now.